Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World by Jessica Marie Johnson (review)

Black women have lived and laboured in New Orleans since the city's founding. Yet their names have been omitted from historical narratives and hidden by the archive of Atlantic slavery. In Wicked Flesh, their stories endure. Jessica Marie Johnson weaves a narrative that starts in Senegambia, travels through the Caribbean, and then lands on the shores of the Gulf Coast. As African women and women of African descent made this journey, they constructed their own practices of freedom—centered around kinship and intimacy—that attempted to safeguard their bodies, relationships, and legacies. Johnson uncovers how these practices reworked African and European conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality, enabling these women to navigate overlapping Atlantic worlds where Atlantic slaving, West African cultures, and European imperial desires collided. In doing so, Johnson reveals "how precarious the search for safe space could be in a world of slaves" (3).

Wicked Flesh begins in the comptoirs of coastal Senegal. There, African women were "cultural brokers" who forged practices to ensure their survival and power (31). Nowhere is this more obvious than the prevalence of marriage à la mode du pays. Rather than submit to Catholic marriage, many African women formalized their relationships in ways similar to Wolof and Lebu customs. This enabled them to acquire property (including slaves), orchestrate kinship ties, and remarry in the event of a husband's death or disappearance. In other instances, African women leveraged their knowledge of local customs and geopolitics to their advantage. Anne Gusban, for example, defiantly petitioned the Compagnie des Indies to secure the inheritance of her daughter Anne: three slaves. She warned officials that she would no longer be able to portray the Company favourably if they flouted customary inheritance practices. The actions of free African women in the comptoirs not only reveal their power and precarity, but also show how they perpetuated the violence of slaveholding.

As she moves across the Atlantic, Johnson chronicles the trauma of the Middle Passage. The first slaving vessel from Senegambia disembarked along the Gulf Coast in 1719. Onboard, enslaved and free women either endured or witnessed gendered violence. For enslaved women, shipboard resistance laid the foundation for freedom practices in North America. For free women, the transatlantic voyage proved that free status offered little protection. In 1728, Marie Baude traveled to meet her husband in New Orleans. When Baude arrived, the enslaved people she had brought with her were sold. Her claim to human property had vanished, placing her—an unpropertied Senegambian woman—in an even more vulnerable position. Arrival on the Gulf Coast thrust these women into a region defined by imperial rivalries and shifting geographies of slavery, especially in the wake of the Natchez Revolt. Their understandings of race, gender, and intimacy, as well as their practices of freedom, had to acclimatize to this new setting.

The final chapters focus on New Orleans where Black women learned of the instability of freedom and their tenuous claims to property. Johnson's chapter on Black femme freedom chronicles how women developed an array of strategies beyond manumission, from political appeals, to the refusal of sexual advances to acts of self-expression, that embodied "resistive femininity" (174). Included are the stories of Marie Charlotte and Louise, whose manumission failed to secure their freedom in the wake of their enslaver's death, and Fanchon, who defended herself against sexual slurs. These stories reveal radical tools for survival— and even pleasure—in a world where possession and violence awaited Black women. The final chapter demonstrates how these women "drove inheritance practices," determining their heirs and refining circles of kinship in the process (206). In both chapters, women created transgressive practices that defied enslavers' attempts—as well as imperial attempts—to circumvent their freedom and dispossess them of their bodies and property. Instead, these women aimed to control their own lives and legacies.

Johnson joins historians such as Stephanie Camp...